As Facebook Goes Parabolic, Social Media Adoption at Work Is Slower Affair

As Facebook Inc. usage soars in the consumer context, the adoption of social platforms in the workplace is a much slower and steadier process, according to interviews with corporate IT chiefs and other experts.

Adoption of social media for the enterprise generally doesn’t share the viral properties of Facebook, Twitter Inc., or business-oriented LinkedIn Corp. In retrospect, that probably shouldn’t be too surprising, although initial forecasts for the social enterprise clearly had a bit of stardust baked into them. “The growth of the enterprise social software market certainly hasn’t been what it was initially hyped. The market is maturing amid consolidation and integration,” Forrester Inc. analyst Philipp Karcher says. “However, we see improving adoption every year as enterprise social becomes a standard component in the employee toolkit.”

Adoption might not have improved fast enough for Yammer co-founder David Sacks, who announced Thursday — on Twitter –that he was leaving the business, which Microsoft Inc. bought two years ago for $1.2 billion. Yammer will become part of Outlook and Office 365, the cloud-based version of its productivity tools. “We’re bringing the Yammer organization together with our Outlook and Office 365 teams as the next logical step in delivering even more integrated social, collaboration and communication,” Bryan Goode, senior director of product marketing for enterprise social at Microsoft, said in a statement.

Forecasts for the growth of enterprise social software have fallen by roughly 50% during the last two years.

In 2012, market researcher IDC said the sector had a five-year compound annual growth rate of 42%, and would reach about $4.5 billion in 2016, according to Vanessa Thompson, a research manager at IDC, who specializes in enterprise social networks and collaborative technologies. But this year, IDC said the market had a five-year, compound annual growth rate of 23%, and would hit $2.3 billion in 2018, according to Ms. Thompson. “It has come down quite dramatically,” she said.

One reason for the change, according to Ms. Thompson, is that social and collaborative elements will be embedded in all manner of applications and tools, reducing the reliance on standalone software. “But that will take a very long time,” she said.

From the start, company evangelists sensed that social was important, but they have struggled to build a business case for its use. Companies rely on Facebook and Twitter to measure customer outcomes and perceptions, but they use enterprise platforms in different ways, primarily for collaboration, according to Mr. Karcher.

Of course, that can lead to improved customer service and perhaps sales. “For example, earlier this year we recognized an enterprise social program by Cisco Systems Inc. (using Lithium‘s social platform) to externalize findings by internal engineers addressing customer problems. The program led to cost savings from a reduction in customer case load (and presumably higher customer satisfaction),” Mr. Karcher said.

Social and collaborative software shouldn’t be measured as standalone applications, according to Peter Coffee, vice president for strategic research at Salesforce.com Inc. “Any attempt to measure social by looking at discreet products seems to me to be missing the point,” Mr. Coffee said. “It is like having a telephone room at the end of the hallway where you make your calls. The phone is infused into the way we get work done.”

He said that social software is rapidly becoming the new “central nervous system” of companies that use it, expanding rapidly beyond traditional sales functions and becoming infused in IT infrastucture itself, where objects in a database can send automated updates.

Most companies aren’t yet using social media in that fashion, let alone measuring the outcomes from the perspective of a business model.

In a Forrester survey of employees responsible for social initiatives, less than half – 39%– said that they were tracking the business impact of social platforms. The study asked about 10 metrics, and employee satisfaction, cited by 10% of respondents, was the most popular. Only 12% of respondents looked at the impact of social platforms on sales and revenue, according to Mr. Karcher.

Most companies that employ social media in the enterprise are still concerned with basic issues of adoption and activity, an issue for 55% of respondents, according to Mr. Karcher.

The collaborative benefits of social platforms are clear enough to Trent Gavazzi, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Availity LLC, a health claims clearinghouse with 700 employees. They use Microsoft’s Yammer to share information and collaborate on projects. The sales and service team also uses Salesforce.com Inc.’s Chatter to discuss leads and exchange other information about accounts.

From a corporate culture perspective, Mr. Gavazzi sees Yammer as an important socialization tool to “get people out of their [email] inboxes” and share more information with colleagues who they normally wouldn’t connect with via email due to office politics. For example, the CEO can use Yammer to comment on a public post about a company picnic. “It allows a direct conversation between folks would not necessarily talk to each other,” said Mr. Gavazzi. “Its [use has] grown on its own.” He also says it reduces the common email problem of accidentally excluding members of a team or group on a thread that requires collaboration.

The success of Yammer inspired Availity to build social chat and commenting tools within its own software, including an application that facilitates the release of payments between an insurer and provider. Mr. Gavazzi said this has helped improve collaboration between insurers and hospitals.

New England Biolabs Inc. began running both Chatter and Yammer social software two years ago, says Ken Grady, the bioscience company’s CIO. However, he said he shuttered Yammer, which employees were using as part of Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud email and collaboration software six months after launch because adoption was weak. The reason, he said, was that roughly 80% of NE’s 500 employees opted to user Chatter over Yammer.

Chatter was more deeply integrated into the company’s business processes, including sales and marketing, and technical support, according to Mr. Grady. The use of Chatter, he said, led to a decrease in the volume of certain email threads because employees know it’s easier to initiate group conversations in Chatter.

None of this is remotely similar to Facebook’s meltup, and perhaps that is unlikely to change. But social media at work still has a future, workmanlike as it perhaps may be. In the words of Mr. Karcher: “Companies and their employees will continue to participate in multiple social networks using different social platforms.”